020Stone Mosaic Patio in Appleton
posted by Jeff on July 9th, 2007
Billions and billions of stones…
It wasn’t really, but it felt like it. This was a project I was looking forward to and dreading, all at the same time. The client is a fantastic one - we’ve done work every year at their residence for the last six years, and they’re always interested in taking the road less traveled when it comes to landscape design. This was going to be one of those uniquely interesting projects you only get to tackle once or twice a year if you’re lucky.
But the exceptional patience required to construct a patio like this, where each of the several thousands of stones in that area would have to be hand-selected and then carefully put in place, was something I wasn’t sure we’d have in sufficient quantity.
The trick was to just forget about the installation of this flagstone and mosaic patio being anything near expedient or efficient. Once we got over that hurdle, it was actually somewhat relaxing finding each stone, selected for it’s specific size, color and shape, and placing it firmly into the sand/portland mix, before covering the entire area in polymeric sand, a material we use most often between the joints in our brick paver patios.
The end result? A surprisingly firm and stable, fantastically gorgeous flagstone / stone mosaic patio, unlike anything else in the city of Appleton, and maybe all of Wisconsin’s Fox Valley.
001: Hamons Custom Landscaping,
December 7th, 2007 at 10:25 pmI really am impressed with this project. You do excellent work!
002: gail,
July 10th, 2009 at 9:58 amI’ve been wanting to do a mosiac for some time. My stuggle is finding rocks–What rocks did you use on your mosaic and where did you get supply. Right now I am looking for blue river rock. Thanks–gg
003: Jeff,
July 10th, 2009 at 11:30 amBecause every stone supplier can call their types of decorative stone whatever they want, providing the names of the stones would most likely be meaningless.
But in selecting stone, we found what works best is stone in the 1 1/2″ - 3″ variety, something that’s angular instead of rounded - the angular stone lock together and stay in place better than the rounded ones.
As for where to find it - just check your local landscape supply yards that have bins of different kinds of stone.
Also, for cost reasons this one was not mortared in place, but our preference is to mortar the stones to a concrete slab to give better hold.
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